In recent years, there has been much focus on the apparent heterogeneity of schizophrenic symptoms. By contrast, this article proposes a unifying account emphasizing basic abnormalities of consciousness that underlie and also antecede a disparate assortment of signs and symptoms. Schizophrenia, we argue, is fundamentally a self-disorder or ipseity disturbance that is characterized by complementary distortions of the act of awareness: hyperreflexivity and diminished self-affection. Hyperreflexivity refers to forms of exaggerated self-consciousness in which aspects of oneself are experienced as akin (...) to external objects. Diminished self-affection or self-presence refers to a weakened sense of existing as a vital and self-coinciding source of awareness and action. This article integrates recent psychiatric research and European phenomenological psychiatry with some current work in cognitive science and phenomenological philosophy. After introducing the phenomenological approach along with a theoretical account of normal consciousness and self-awareness, we turn to a variety of schizophrenic syndromes. We examine positive, then negative, and finally disorganization symptoms—attempting in each case to illuminate shared distortions of consciousness and the sense of self. We conclude by discussing the possible relevance of this approach for identifying early schizophrenic symptoms. (shrink)

The work of Hussefl and Freud had common sources in the philosophy, psychology and physiology of the nineteenth century. Herbart, Brentano, Helmholtz, Fechner, Wundt and Mach were among the towering figures in their common background who had influence on their respective work. 1 Although contemporaries who had little concern for the other's professional interest, Husserl and Freud nevertheless struggled with some common problems. One of these is the relationship of sensation to memory and to the experience of time. The concepts (...) of sensation, memory and time were, in fact, artifacts which the empirical methods of nerve-physiology, the psychophysical testing of sensory thresholds, as well as the metaphysics and positivism of the late nineteenth century had left them. (shrink)

When subjects view stimulation of a rubber hand while feeling congruent stimulation of their own hand, they may come to feel that the rubber hand is part of their own body. This illusion of body ownership is termed ‘Rubber Hand Illusion’ . We investigated sensitivity of RHI to spatial mismatches between visual and somatic experience. We compared the effects of spatial mismatch between the stimulation of the two hands, and equivalent mismatches between the postures of the two hands. We created (...) the mismatch either by adjusting stimulation or posture of the subject’s hand, or, in a separate group of subjects, by adjusting stimulation or posture of the rubber hand. The matching processes underlying body ownership were asymmetrical. The illusion survived small changes in the subject’s hand posture, but disappeared when the same posture transformations were applied to the rubber hand. Mismatch between the stimulation delivered to the subject’s hand and the rubber hand abolished the illusion. The combination of these two situations is of particular interest. When the subject’s hand posture was slightly different from the rubber hand posture, the RHI remained as long as stimulation of the two hands was congruent in a hand-centred spatial reference frame, even though the altered posture of the subject’s hand meant that stimulation was incongruent in external space. Conversely, the RHI was reduced when the stimulation was incongruent in hand-centred space but congruent in external space. We conclude that the visual–tactile correlation that causes the RHI is computed within a hand-centred frame of reference, which is updated with changes in body posture. Current sensory evidence about what is ‘me’ is interpreted with respect to a prior mental body representation. (shrink)

A bodily self is characterized by pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness that is.

The naturalization of consciousness and the way a subjective perspective arises are hotly debated both in the cognitive sciences and in more strictly philosophical contexts. A number of these debates, mainly inspired by neuroscientific findings, focus on the ‘visceral’ dimension of the body in order to formulate a hypothesis for the coming about of consciousness. This focus on what might be called the ‘in-depth body’ shows that consciousness or the subjective perspective is intimately linked with vital and visceral regulatory processes.I (...) join the debate by arguing that representationalist accounts of the origin of consciousness in the in-depth body exhibit a number of flaws hitherto mainly unnoticed. Furthermore, some aspects of neuroscientific theories are explored as possible validations of a nonrepresentationalist model of consciousness and the subjective perspective. Inspired by phenomenological philosophy, I present a hypothesis in which the subjective perspective constitutes itself and in which the ‘in-depth’ body is not the object of representations in the brain. Rather, the ‘in-depth body’ is in a non-objectified way built-in in the subjective perspective itself. In this account, therefore, the subjective perspective looses its transparency and gains ‘interoceptive thickness’. (shrink)

Having a self is associated with important advantages for an organism.These advantages have been suggested to include mechanisms supporting elaborate capacities for planning, decision-making, and behavioral control. Acknowledging such functionality offers possibilities for obtaining traction on investigation of neural correlates of selfhood. A method that has potential for investigating some of the brain-based properties of self arising in behavioral contexts varying in requirements for such behavioral guidance and control is functional brain imaging. Data obtained with this method are beginning to (...) converge on a set of brain areas that appear to play a significant role in permitting conscious access to representational content having reference to self as an embodied and independent experiencer and agent. These areas have been identified in a variety of imaging contexts ranging from passive state conditions in which they appear to manifest ongoing activity associated with spontaneous and typically ‘self-related’ cognition, to tasks targeting explicitly experienced properties of self, to demanding task conditions where activity within them is attenuated in apparent redirection of cognitive resources in the service of task guidance and control. In this paper, these data will be reviewed and a hypothesis presented regarding a significant role for these areas in enabling degrees of self-awareness and participating in the management of such behavioral control. (shrink)